If gender is separate from sex, why is this necessary?
Why can’t it be that the pronouns “she” and “her” are used in reference to a person’s identified gender, but the terms “man” and “male” refers to their actual sex? If gender and sex aren’t connected, there is no reason for those terms to align.
Sure, we could make such a rule, but ISTM that overall it would be more confusing to split sex vs. gender within ordinary social use of traditionally gender-specific terms than by using extra modifiers on such terms where necessary.
For example, I think it would be more confusing in ordinary conversation to have to parse a sentence like “Tim will be a bit late because he had to visit the women’s room” than one like “Tanya doesn’t get GYN exams because she’s transgender”.
Those examples don’t actually use the words “male” or “female” and so their relevance is not apparent. What’s wrong with “Tanya doesn’t get GYN exams because she’s male”? Aside from the strange interest in Tanya’s doctor’s appointments?
And if that’s a problem, what’s the word now - if “male” and “female” are now to be purely on the basis of identification - for, say, a person who is of the sex class that generally develops towards the production of eggs and the bearing of young?
Well, my first example used the term “women” as in “women’s room”, and I thought you were proposing that “women” and “men” be considered synonymous with “female” and “male” respectively. So yeah, quite relevant.
That’s also semantically fine under your proposed redefinitions, as is “Tanya doesn’t get GYN exams because she’s a man”.
But I still think that most people in ordinary conversation would find “Tanya doesn’t get GYN exams because she’s male” less intuitively comprehensible than “Tanya doesn’t get GYN exams because she’s transgender”.
And your proposed redefinition also leaves us without a category descriptor for gender identification. What term do you use for the category “all the people whose gender identification corresponds to she/her pronouns”, if you have now defined “women” and “female” to mean exclusively “people with biologically female sex, irrespective of their gender identity”?
AFAICT expressions like “biologically female”, such as I’ve been using all along in this discussion, do a perfectly good job of designating biological sex.
I would think we’d still need words for “genetically XY” and “genetically XX”. Traditionally those would be the words male and female. Regardless of anyone’s gender identity, there are still very important and relevant differences between people who have certain genetic codes (like testosterone level). As long as everyone is okay with words having multiple meanings, it seems like it should still be appropriate to use male and female to refer to people who are of the associated genetics.
Sure, with the caveat that “XY” and “XX” don’t match perfectly to the traditional categories “male” and “female”. There are XY individuals with female genitalia and physical development, for example.
Sure; as I keep saying, the meanings of words depend on what humans use them to mean, not on logically rigid dictates about what they “have to” mean.
However, when we change the ways we use certain words, we usually end up having to change our usage of other words as well to avoid ambiguity. In the case of the change I’m endorsing, where we use “woman/female” and “man/male” in a general social sense to refer to gender identity, we have to resort to specific modifiers to distinguish between gender identity and biological sex (e.g., “female-identified” vs. “biologically female”).
In the case you propose, if “male” and “female” refer only to biological sex, then we’d need new or modified terms for adjectival versions of the gender-designating words “man” and “woman”. For instance, it wouldn’t make sense to say that a transgender man has a “male gender identity”, right? Because that would imply that he has biologically male sex, which he doesn’t.
Long story short, any process of recognizing the existence of transgender individuals in human societies that have traditionally used rigidly binary models of sex and gender is going to require a certain amount of linguistic change. I think the types of linguistic changes I’m advocating will end up being the fairest and least disruptive in the long run, but that’s just my opinion, and other people can certainly propose different alternatives.
For the same reason it’s rude to tell an obese person they are fat in casual conversation, but it is unreasonable to expect society to validate their belief they are skinny. It doesn’t cost anything to be courteous and kind. Obligating a pronoun request is courteous and kind. But it does cost something to deny reality and indulge a delusion just to spare feelings.
If there were no policy, legal, or scientific underpinnings to “female” and “male”, maybe I wouldn’t care so much. But this is the world we live in. And we live in a world where statistics are used for all kinds of decision-making. It is important to have accurate information. Let’s say we entitle males to use women’s spaces. And we see a surge in crime because males now have a pass to be in women’s spaces with impunity. Are the gender ideologues going to turn around and blame this surge on women/females, since that’s what the penis-having sexual predators probably will identify as when they are nabbed? Or will we continue to call these individuals “males” because that’s indeed what they are and knowing they are males will help us figure out whether we need to course-correct on allowing males to have unfettered access to women’s spaces? I want to maintain reliable datasets regarding sex/gender for the same reason I want to maintain datasets regarding race. We aren’t “gender blind” or “race blind”. Women are still victims of sex discrimination. They are still disproprotionately victimized by males with respect to sexual crimes. Women are still a vulnerable group in this society. “Women” should not be turned into a meaningless construct until women are no longer a stigmatized group.
I’m all for negotiating and compromise. Pronoun usage is a compromise that we normies should be able to grant without being a jerk about it. And it gives people what they want, which is for their gender to be affirmed. But society shouldn’t have to give in to every single thing that TRAs are demanding. That’s not how any other civil rights movement has worked.
I would not necessarily see it that way. That is using two different definitions of the word male, which is fine. Lots of words have multiple definitions and we use context to understand the difference. One is using biological genetic XY definition, and the other is using the definition of the set of common traits and behavioral patterns of genetically XY people. A transwoman is genetically male, but may conform more to female behaviors. I don’t see a problem with saying “A transwoman is a male that identifies as female.”
It gets confusing if someone just says “I am female”, because there’s not enough context to know if they mean they are gentically XX or that they are XY but identify as female. But in that case, it should be the responsibility of the speaker clarify if they mean the non-primary definition of female (genetically XX) to avoid this confusion. It’s like if I say “Pick up milk from the store”, the assumption is I mean cow’s milk. If I want almond milk, it’s up to me to be more specific.
There is absolutely no need to have a word that codes for this, because it doesn’t fill a linguistic gap. If there was need to communicate about whom this set of pronouns matched to, you could simply specify female and transfemale people. These are the two categories.
Sorry, but that just seems like a nonsensical comparison. Do you really think that the reason it’s considered discourteous to call fat people “fat” in polite conversation is that it would contradict fat people’s own belief that they are skinny?!
That’s absurd. Fat people don’t believe that they’re skinny and don’t expect to be treated as though they’re skinny (what would that even look like? being urged to gain weight? having size-4 clothing offered to them by salespeople? being made to sit on chairs that are too flimsy for them? ridiculous).
It is dishonest and demeaning to say that transgender identity is intrinsically reality-denying and a delusion. Transgender people know that their assigned birth sex is different from the gender that they identify as. That’s the reality. In no case that I’m aware of are transgender people denying that reality or asking anyone else to deny it. FFS, the very fact that they call themselves transgender is a direct acknowledgement of that reality.
What you are trying to do is arbitrarily decree that categories for gender identity must always be used exactly synonymously with the corresponding categories for biological sex, and then call transgender people delusional and reality-denying if they use the categories differently, to reflect a more complicated neurobiological reality of sex and gender. Not really all that “courteous and kind” of you, monstro.
I’m still trying to figure out what exactly you mean by “entitle males to use women’s spaces”, and what it means for males to “have a pass to be in women’s spaces with impunity”.
Of course, we currently don’t check people’s official sex designation at the door of gender-specific spaces, whether by looking at their genitals or by looking at the “M” or “F” designation on their ID card. I don’t see any way to officially prevent “M”-card people from entering “F”-card spaces unless you impose such a routine door check. And I’m assuming that routine door checks are not in fact what you’re advocating.
So, is it that you want it to be socially unacceptable for any individuals who look as though they might have an “M” card to be in an “F”-card space? Or is it that you want it to be legally permissible to require individuals to show their ID if challenged, and to be booted out of an “F”-card space if their card says “M”? Or both?
You have yet to make a convincing argument that either of those goals would realistically contribute to keeping women safe. We cannot keep all “male-appearing” individuals out of women-designated spaces even if we want to, no matter how we write the rules about sex and gender segregation. There are always going to be a significant number of “male-appearing” individuals who have an undeniable right to be in women-designated spaces.
And mandating that individuals must show their ID in an “F”-card space when challenged, and be booted out if their card says “M”, doesn’t accomplish jack-shit unless we’ve got the enforcement presence to make compliance a reality. And if we’ve got that enforcement presence, that’s going to deter crimes by male predators whether “M”-card people are officially allowed in the space or not. Conversely, the absence of adequate security is going to facilitate crimes by male predators whether “M”-card people are officially banned from the space or not.
I don’t see how anything I’m advocating would prevent us as a society from “maintain[ing] reliable datasets regarding sex/gender”. We can acknowledge and respect people’s gender identity without denying their biology or their past lived experience.
I haven’t proposed any redefinitions. YOU seem to want to redefine “male” and “female.” I didn’t think that was on the table and have no idea why it would be, because now I really don’t know what the hell those words mean. What’s the point in rendering them meaningless, too?
“Transwoman” rather aptly describes such a person if they’re not female.
Look, I’m fine with language changing. What makes no sense is rendering words meaningless and, as others have much better explained than I, using them to be deliberately deceptive by conflating different meanings.
If it’s necessary now to change “female” to “biologically female,” what does just “female” mean?
This was directed at monstro, but I’ll answer it on my own; this is the absolute opposite of the truth. What we are trying to say is that we need to accept the categories of biological sex exist, and that words assigned to those categories mean something, and have value to retain.
If you believe that people have some essence of thinking they are in some intangible way in their brain the sex they are otherwise not, and want to describe those things, great. But people - real people, this isn’t theory - are trying to confuse the issue by conflating gender with sex, and they’re using language to do it. That is not a fringe position, Kimstu. It’s becoming commonplace and it has real world impact.
Shrugging our shoulders and saying “trans women are women” and reducing “woman” to meaninglessness is why June Eastwood is stealing athletic opportunity from females, XX people, whatever word you want me to use. Biowomen? Can we settle on a damn term so that I can come out in favor of splitting sports into two clear categories? Just tell me what the words are, would you?
No. “Male” and “female” are frequently used in ordinary language to indicate something other than biological sex. For instance, people speak of having a “female gender identity”, or reading “female magazines”, or wearing “female accessories”. That’s using the word “female” to indicate something about gender identity and/or conformity to gender stereotypes, not biological sex.
If you want the words “male” and “female” to have no permissible meaning other than as designations of an organism’s binary sex, you’re the one advocating for redefinition.
Well, like many other common words, it means a lot of things, including “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male”. It’s also sometimes used, for example, as a synonym for “feminine” or “conforming to gender stereotypes about women”, or as a derogatory term to mean “inferior”.
I’m sorry if it bugs you that the word “female” does not have and has never had a single unambiguous meaning designating only biological sex, but it’s ridiculous to try to blame me for that.
Even the briefest glance at a dictionary confirms that the words assigned to the categories of biological sex have never had only the rigidly unambiguous meaning that you’re trying to limit them to. You are not going to get anywhere trying to roll back linguistic evolution to the point where “female” and “male” have no meaning other than binary biological sex.
It looks to me as though you’re the ones attempting to conflate gender with sex, and complaining that other people are “confusing the issue” by not accepting your prescriptivist dictates about what words “have to” mean.
A word that people use with intended and understood meaning doesn’t become meaningless just because you don’t like the way they’re using it.
Well, I’m not the arbiter of what the “correct” words are for talking about sex and gender. But throughout this discussion, I’ve been using respectful and clear language for both transgender and cisgender people in various sex and gender categories, and you seem to have understood me just fine. So it seems a bit disingenuous for you to start whining that you just need someone to explain to you what words you’re supposed to use.
For example, if it’s “two clear categories” about sports competition that you want, it would be perfectly clear and accurate for you to say that you don’t think transgender female athletes should compete against cisgender female athletes. You could have picked up on that nomenclature some two thousand posts ago, if it hadn’t been so important to you to keep calling transgender female athletes “males” or “boys” or “men”.
To sum up: Everybody, including transgender people themselves, already knows that transgender people aren’t cisgender. Everybody knows that saying “transgender women are women” refers to their gender identity, not to their birth biological sex. Everybody can tell why transphobic rhetoric insists on misgendering transgender people, and that it’s not for the sake of “clarity”.
And pretty much everybody else has already had the sense to leave this discussion in the shithole it slid into, rather than continuing to play whack-a-mole with transphobic rhetoric.
There are some valid points floating around in “gender-critical” advocacy (which in most cases were never contested by their opponents), such as the following:
But I am pretty much wore down, at least for the time being, with constantly having to wade through all the transphobic rhetoric in trying to discuss these and related points seriously. I argued for twenty-odd years with people coming up with torturously inventive reasons why they shouldn’t call lesbian wives “wives” or gay husbands “husbands”, and I have acquired a tired about their spiritual descendants coming up with similar reasons why they shouldn’t call transgender women “women” or transgender men “men”. My apologies to transgender brethren and sistren here for temporarily dropping the allyship ball, but I won’t give up the (ally)ship for the long run.
And finally, a remark about terms like “menstruators” and “people who menstruate”:
Example: It is reductive and insulting to say something like “Men line up on the left side of the room, menstruators on the right side.” Misogynistic and offensive.
Example: It is not reductive or insulting to say something like “Menstruators need to devote significant amounts of time and resources to menstrual hygiene that non-menstruators do not.” Not misogynistic, not offensive.
If J.K. Rowling in a moment of brain-fart had only managed to grasp that simple distinction, we might all have spared ourselves nearly four thousand posts’ worth of strife.
So if a group of people use the word “women” or “female” with a certain intention and expected understanding it retains a specific meaning?
If, in a situation where it is relvant, people use “female” to mean biologically female and enough people understand it as such then it is a useful word to use yes? Same with male.
The fact that you don’t like the way they are using it doesn’t really matter does it?
The situations where it is relevant are (all always) a matter of politeness balanced with the need for clarity and honesty. When talking about sport for instance it makes sense to talk in terms of females and males. Caitlyn Jenner is male, that is why she was competing alongside other male athletes at the Olympics. Nothing inherently transphobic about that fact. Bringing it up unnecessarily at every opportunity, of course, would be.
Certainly as an intrigued bystander that seems pretty clear and unambiguous and not hard to grasp for 99% of scenarios we’d encounter. Female/male etc. for biololgical sex and women/men etc. for gender identity.
Now if the push is to allow “female” to more generally include the set of people who are also “male” then we now need other words to refer to those biological concepts, which in their own turn will have their usage considered as “transphobia”.
There are plenty of fat people who don’t believe they are fat. They think they are “thick” or “curvacious”. Some actually do think they are skinny and need to GAIN weight. Mind you, the folks who believe this about themselves are a small minority of fat people. But they exist.
My analogy is not perfect and I admit that the comparison to trans folks is liable to ruffle feathers. But there really is no other analog to transgenderism in society. If someone were to claim to be “transracial” or “transethnic”, they would be laughed at…despite race/ethnicity having a genetic underpinning, despite race/ethnicity being social constructs that are “no big deal”. If someone were to claim to be “transabled” (a person who believes themselves to have a physical handicapped, despite not being so), they would be referred to a psychiatrist and urged to get help. Society would not try enable their delusion by granting them the entitlements we reserve for the physically disabled. I don’t think trans people should be laughed at. I don’t think we should lock them up in a mental ward. I think we should provide reasonable accommodations for them. But I don’t think we should go all in on what they want without having a very good reason. A trans individual that actually transforms their body to conform to their preferred gender should be given more gravitas than the trans individual who is fine with their body and just wants to permission to be gender non-conforming with regards to dress and mannerisms. The first should be able to petition for a legal sex change. They should be considered for sports competition with ciswomen. They should be given full access to public women’s spaces (private clubs and organizations are another matter). But the second individual should only expect to be granted the pronouns they want. If they want more “gender affirmation” than pronoun usage, then they need to do more than just change their clothing and hairstyle. Both groups are entitled to fair employment, housing, education, and security/safety–you know, basic human rights. I don’t see how this framework is oppressive.
It is dishonest and demeaning to say that transgender identity is intrinsically reality-denying and a delusion. Transgender people know that their assigned birth sex is different from the gender that they identify as. That’s the reality.
I don’t think that’s the reality. If it were the reality, we wouldn’t be having this particular conversation. We would be talking about the ramifications of “male women” and “female man” if TRAs weren’t denying biological realities. I could work with a framework like “male women” and “female man” because this is a moderate position. It actually respects the concerns of all the “old school robots” who prefer the status quo but are open to some gradual change. It acknowledges the social constructness of gender and the biological reality of sex. But instead of a moderate position, all I’m hearing is from TRAs and allies is “Transwomen are Women AND FEMALE!!!” I’m already having a hard time with TWAW. Why the hell wouldn’t I have a super hard time with TWAWAF? And I’m a progressive with an adequate amount of wokeness. If someone like me is having a hard time with all of this, I can’t even imagine what the average Jesus-loving American thinks. It is arrogant and foolish to think that screeching “TERF” and “BIGOTRY!!!” is all you have to do to get people to move towards your side. Come up with some moderate positions and maybe the JRK’s out there won’t have a leg to stand on.
What you are trying to do is arbitrarily decree that categories for gender identity must always be used exactly synonymously with the corresponding categories for biological sex, and then call transgender people delusional and reality-denying if they use the categories differently, to reflect a more complicated neurobiological reality of sex and gender. Not really all that “courteous and kind” of you, monstro.
What I’m hearing you and folks on your side say is that words should not mean anything anymore because embueing them with concrete definitions is inherently oppressive and harmful. But y’all don’t seem to appreciate that removing the meaning of words is ALSO oppressive and harmful. It is oppressive and harmful to the 50% of humanity who need their group to be seen as a cohesive group that is not subject to change from generation to generation. When we study women’s history, we don’t go back and look for individuals who act like women. We look for the females. Females are not a nebulous, ill-defined, socially constructed group. I don’t want this to change. I don’t understand why feminists of all people would want this to change.
So I don’t care about being courteous and kind all the way down the line, no matter the cost, no matter how crazy it may seem. I will be always courteous and kind when dealing with individuals, but I have my limits for what I will be down for. If I ever befriend a transwoman and she refers to us as “girls”, I will be courteous and kind and go along with this because there is no cost to me and presumably I want to keep being her friend. But if she is an intact male who has refuses to take hormones? I will not be marching in the streets on her behalf to demand society allow her to change her sex from M to F. And if she gets rejected from women’s spaces, I will not be beating down the door on her behalf, especially if she is still presenting as male. Because I firmly believe that no one is obligated to affirm someone’s gender no matter what. I think it is oppressive to force people (especially women) to open the door to anyone who knocks. The freedom of gender identity really does need to go both ways for this “gender is no big deal!” concept to work. If it is one-sided (people have the right to identify however they want, but no one has the right to exclude them), then we’re not really dealing with a social construct in the truest sense of the word. We’re dealing with a cudgel. No one should be beaten over the head with the cudgel of gender. Either gender is no big deal or it is a very big deal. If it’s the latter, then we really do need to have some gatekeeping rules. Because things that are a “very big deal” have rules so that they can be protected and preserved. Gender ideologues need to make up their mind just how important gender really is.
I will also say this about “courteous and kind”.
Courteous, kind, well-behaved women seldom make history. Women have to say “NO!” sometimes. They have to risk being Karens sometimes. When we care more about being courteous and kind than having our concerns addressed, we get screwed. This is what I have learned from history. So I am not in support of anything that shames a woman for saying “NO!” That’s what the trans movement seems to be doing a whole lot of right now, and it’s a huge turn-off for me. I need to hear a little less shaming and a whole lot more “We hear what you saying” for me to get behind this stuff.
This Is at least 75% why the tides have shifted so rapidly after the JKR furore started in June. Imagine the last scene in Animal Farm; it was a lightbulb moment for many women.
Women are used to being vilified when they enforce boundaries against aggressive men. Almost every woman at one time or another has had to reject the advances of a jerk whose lack of empathy and self-awareness disqualified him from 1st base. And almost every woman has experienced the verbal and emotional abuse that comes with this rejection, no matter how kind and respectfully it’s communicated. We know what this looks like and we know where it comes from. We also know that women are not socialized to act like this.
With the debate that is happening right now, it is eerily familiar territory. Except instead of being shamed, slandered, and interrogated because we don’t want to be naked around one penis without our consent, the abuse is occurring because we don’t want to be naked around any penises without our consent. It is impossible now to shake the perception that gender affirmation is being forced upon women and girls using the same coercive tactics penis-havers have always used to get their way. If we weren’t talking about spaces where nudeness occurs, perhaps this perception would be different. But it’s not.
Women are staring down the barrel of future where they can’t enforce a no-male policy when they are at their most vulnerable. Lovely misogyny-flavored words like “histrionic” are being openly used against them when they express their concerns. Their heels are digging in because…why wouldn’t they dig in? No concessions are being made, no peaceable negotiation is happening. Our language is being taken from us and we only get spat at when we object. Just more of the same kind of verbal and emotional abuse that we recognize whenever Jim Bob the street harasser is denied a woman’s phone numbers.
For my own understanding of what you mean here, if JKR said the following:
“XYs on the left side of the room, XXs on the right.”
Would that be okay or misogynistic?
It is disappointing to continue to see such naked bias coming from your posts.
When people push against attempts to redefine the words “woman”, “man”, “male”, and “female”, they get called transphobic. They explain until they blue in the face why clarity and precision are needed both from a political sense as well as a health communication sense, but none of this seems to matter. It’s always transphobic to you because it hurts trans people’s feelings.
Okay, fair enough,
But when women repeatedly express why “menstruator” hits their ears like Incel-style misogyny, why the refusal to respect this position? If I didn’t know any bettter, I would think you were doing your best imitation of a mansplainer. There is never a good reason to call women menstruators when so many women are saying they hate this shit.
As long as the language concessions are expected to be one-sided, there will always be a fight. I will never be persuaded by anyone who thinks the female sex class is not entitled to speech that validates their humanity. Never.